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You don't find that a gmail address on a business card conveys that it's a 1-2 person operation or very loosely organized? Given the low barrier to entry for setting up hosted email (google apps being $5/mo/user) I personally get the impression the person doesn't take their business seriously, on par with business cards with perforated edges from home printing.

I know my gut reaction when I get a (semi-)professional email from a gmail account is "ok.. what's the scam angle on this one?"

Starfighter is new, but there are (at least?) two members coming from Matasano who used the crypto challenges (cryptopals.com) as a hiring tool in the past.

If you haven't tried the cryptopals challenges, they're basically coding exercises to illustrate common crypto problems and weaknesses. While giving the people maintaing the challenges concrete, comparable coding samples to see how people tackle non-standard coding problems.

It will be interesting to how this evolves, I found the other challenges interesting in that even if the participant wasn't interested in job hunting / didn't make the cut they still walked away learning something.

[Disclosure: I work for TabbedOut]

Thanks martin for the mention!

We’ve spent a lot of time working on this problem space. Ultimately, there are a few different takes on solutions and different ones make more sense in certain situations. The IRL vending machine scenario outlined in the original article may make sense in some counter service places, but far less in a white tablecloth restaurant situation.

While on the surface it may seem like it is not a hard technical problem, it can be. Two approaches to solving the problem include writing middleware integrations for incumbent point of sale software (eg. TabbedOut) or write the point of sale software yourself (eg. Square). Both can have hurdles to overcome on the technical side as well as the human side.

So some of the obstacles in place are: is there an existing point of sale? Would the restaurant require something more powerful than an old school cash register? Who should be processing the credit cards? How quick does fund settlement take place? How much disruption of the normal business process is acceptable (fix things, but don’t make a server’s life more difficult)?

On another note, from the end of the article where Nick mentions that he would be happy paying an extra 10% tip, that seems like a nice gesture, but in practice that isn’t a common mindset from the consumer. When TabbedOut launched, there was a $0.99 service charge for tabs opened with the app. Overall, the concept of making the consumer pay for the service was not very well received.

We’re constantly working on improving our solution and would welcome any feedback. Oh, we’re also hiring engineers if this sounds like a problem anyone would like to help solve [careers@tabbedout.com].

I'm sure I did, but couldn't resist being a smartass

Step 1: Don't post to Hackernews that you hack into places

.. Tongue in cheek commentary aside, the title comes off more like the content would be on par with the grugq's presentation on Opsec for hackers (http://www.slideshare.net/grugq/opsec-for-hackers).

The argument to never modify anything only holds true for pentesting, for a slightly more nefarious attacker it's not unheard of to actually do some system maintenance & configuration fixing to close holes behind them to prevent other attackers from gaining access through the same entry point. Increasing the system stability has a tendency to make people look the other way, it's far less likely that someone would say "Hey, that server has been performing better, let's see if it's been compromised."